Mother May I(95)

“That would never happen to my girls. That would never happen.”

I said his name, but he talked over me, tearing and tearing at the photos, little flecks of destroyed paper drifting down.

“Neither of my daughters would be buying drugs, inviting boys for threesomes. My daughters would never be in that room in the first goddamn place. This was her fucking idea, Bree. Lexie’s. Her idea, her drugs, her choice. She wasn’t raised like my girls have been raised.”

My reaching hands dropped to my sides. Coral was dead, and I was fiercely glad, and yet, as my husband said these things to me, cursed me, spoke to me with such fury that flecks of spittle hit my face, I felt the tug of our old connection. From back when she had owned me. From back when I was hers.

I said quietly, “You’re right. Lexie Pine was raised like me.”

That pushed all his breath out again. He tilted his head back, staring down his nose at me, his nostrils flaring. Then he threw the pictures at me. They were shredded so small that the air caught them. They sprinkled down slowly between us in a fall like snow.

“You are nothing like Lexie Pine,” he said. “You never were.”

In those words I felt the whole world shift. Because he was wrong. I had been. Her own mother had seen it, so much so she changed her ruthless plan to make a deal with me. She’d given Spencer and Adam no choices; she’d shown poor Kelly Wilkerson no mercy. She had bent for me alone, and that bending had let me save my son. His words did more than shift our past. It rewrote history.

What if I had not been in character that day in the High Museum? No theatre-department-borrowed dress, no Betsy-borrowed confidence. Sabreena Kroger, in her thrift-store jeans and faded madras top, hair undone, face bare, skate-walking through the museum in flip-flops, would not have caught his eye. Instead I’d been playing the exact girl he should have married in the first place. Impeccably groomed and expensively clothed, like Maura, but family-oriented, not career-ambitious. I looked like the girl that fit the dreams he used to whisper about back when we started dating, the kind who wanted private-school children and a beach house on Tybee and to live in the old part of Buckhead, two blocks down from his parents.

Or when we started dating, what if my history with men had been more like Betsy’s? Betsy on her rumspringa, pushing boundaries in a way I hadn’t ever needed to try. If I had, would he have kept seeing me, or would I have been a pleasant weekend?

Most of all, if I had ever gotten into trouble, like Lexie Pine in that last picture, would he believe that I’d caused it? Lexie’s body had been passed around, splayed out and stolen onto paper, shown to everyone she knew, shaming her. She’d said no, or tried, with her covered-over mouth. His actions had erased that no, and his choices had erased her future.

He was right in one particular. Our girls were safer than Lexie Pine had ever been. Trey, with his money and connections and powerful family, would destroy anyone who treated his daughters even a fraction so poorly. But he never extended that protection to Lexie, even though he owed it to her. He hadn’t then. He should have stopped when she wanted to stop. If he had, he would have seen Ansel. He could have gone ahead and punched him and taken the negatives then, skipping so many steps and saving Lexie’s future. Instead he’d chosen not to see. He was choosing not to see again, now. He really could not imagine his daughters in her place.

“Because our girls are Cabbats?” I asked, trying anyway. My voice was low. Quiet. Not at all angry. “Trey, you’re a Cabbat. And you were there. You tried the drugs. You wanted the experience. It could happen to Ann—”

“Oh, fuck you,” he said, flushing even darker. “How can you say these things, in our own house? In our bedroom. You know me. You know me.” He paced all the way to the door, waving his arms. “Why are you asking me these things?” It was like he was asking the ceiling or God. He finally looked back to me and said, “You think it’s my fault Robert almost died. You think it’s my fault Spencer—”

“No! Not at all. Not at all, I swear,” I said over him. “That’s all on her. I would never blame you. And we can get through this, I promise. I love you. You’re a good husband, a good father, a good man. Nothing in the past can erase the good I see in you. I love you so much. I’ll stay with you and support you. But you cannot keep on lying to me and to yourself. You have to face it.”

My words had begun to mollify him, right up until the end. Then he hit a level of rage I’d never seen in him. It was worse than the yelling, this ice-white stoic fury. The dark blood color leached from his face. His blue eyes went vacant and cold.

“Are you actually fucking threatening to leave me? Over a thirty-year-old picture of a passing fucking gas pain some shitty girl felt for a fraction of a second in the middle of her own damn orgy?”

It was the “shitty girl” that got me. He didn’t even hear himself say it. I kept my voice calm and repeated, “You have to face it.”

He came back toward me, fast, looming over me, and in his icy glare I understood that tearing up those pictures had not banished her. Lexie was here. She was in me; I was her. A shitty girl from Eastern Jesus, Georgia, who grew up in a tiny ranch house. A shitty girl who never would have earned his second glance. A girl Coral had recognized as one of her own. I put my hands up, defensive, scared. He stopped short, bare inches from me, breathing hard.